i continue to have these bizarrely vivid recurring dreams about lions and tigers. it's been going on for years - decades, maybe - but it comes and goes. recently, it's been really intense....

the plot is some variation on how i'm supposed to get used to them and stop being silly because the idea that they're going to eat me is just me being paranoid, but me knowing better, and escaping moments before they turn on me, which always "excites them" into eating some loved one, which i get the blame for. further, the dream is almost always set in the south gloucester ghetto/project/neighbourhood i grew up in.

i'm convinced i had some kind of traumatic childhood experience with some kind of large cat that lived around the corner on hunter's way, near the community pool. i don't know if it was ever confirmed that there was a large cat living there or not, but i know exactly what house it was. it's very vivid. i was going out to go swimming on my little bicycle (i couldn't have been more than ten years old), and i looked up and saw a bengal tiger walk by. i was absolutely nerd enough of a kid to know the precise difference between a bengal tiger, a snow leopard, an african lion, a puma, a serval, an oceolot, a black jaguar, a cheetah, etc. i had taken out a book from the library that categorically listed every known species of cat (including the smaller species of african and asian wild cats) and studied it pretty closely, so i would have been able to (and for the most part am still able to) identify just about any species of cat i could've seen with a high degree of accuracy.

it didn't seem to see me. but, i sure saw it, and i got on my bike and rode home and didn't go near the pool the rest of the summer due to a very intense and very real fear of the bengal tiger in the house on hunter's point. but every time i explained it, people thought i just had an overactive imagination and was seeing things.

the tiger is usually a lion nowadays, and the place in the neighbourhood shifts dramatically from dream to dream, but i just can't shake this one. and it's not fun to wake up knowing that you just escaped a hungry pack of lions or tigers that you know is about to consume your sister and/or your mom....

the time machine (soundblaster mix) (original upload)

this is the crux of what this thing is going to sound like, i just need to improve the sound fonts and clean the mix up.

this is a temporary mix, built up in noteworthy, that suffers from a slightly blurry drum sound due to everything being run through channel 10 in the soundcard synthesizer. specifically, i'd like to turn the snare down (because it blurs the toms) but it doesn't seem to be possible to do this. obviously, i'll want to fix this as i build more sophisticated mixes of the track. however, this is what the track sounded like on playback as i was actually arranging it....

written in early 2001. drastically rearranged in mid june, 2014. this render was initially created on june 23, 2014.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/soundblaster-mix-3

cops came and went. these ones seemed a little less like your typical cops, and understood the premise a little bit better.

it was pointed out that i'd have a better chance of ensuring a diagnosis if i'm able to build a relationship with an md. this is more or less what i was thinking, it's why i went through the process of seeing a shrink in the first place, but the idea of trying to get a family doctor to build a diagnosis isn't something that crossed my mind. well, it's an avenue to explore, and it would be imprudent not to explore it.

again, they seemed surprised by my level of rational thinking. they weren't really expecting me to agree with them and were visibly shaken by how easily i agreed that the suggestion was reasonable. they seem to have been expecting me to resist somehow.

so, i have an alternate plan i'll want to put into motion in the next few days. but i want to be clear that the fundamental situation remains unaltered.

so, the drums are in for the first half. i think that's done, now. so, lunch time....

the mix is going to be a little messy until i get it imported into cubase. despite notating them in separate staffs, i'm not able to modify the volume of independent drum sounds because they're all out channel 10. afaik, it's a flaw in the technology and i can't do anything about it.

what would happen if phil collins and autechre mated?

gots the toms in....

just slept about 26 hours or so, waking up only briefly to eat and check social media. it's my neck again. i think it's ok, now.

i can't really pin a cause. it's probably a culmination of things. i went for a long walk on friday morning with a bag full of compost, but i really felt fine when i came back. i feel comfortable in my decision to do so, but i don't deny that there's been a little stress about deciding to end my own life in a few months, conditional on circumstances. a lot of coffee. lack of sleep. the piece i've been practicing has got me really tense, with clenched teeth and everything - this is i think is the primary culprit, the others are only secondary. and nicotine (i'm still on target, but cracked a bit last week). guess i just burnt out.

i'm alert now and hoping to finish the sequencing on the track by the end of the night.

uploading the time machine (soundblaster mix) to the scratchpad

my neck is still seized up, so i'm going to sleep a little more. finishing the drums here remains the primary priority. but, this is what i did yesterday. the idea here is to ask for suggestions.....

https://googledrive.com/host/0B5JfVE9XTZikMS1zek9ER0xSU1E/scratchpad/

my neck seized up again a few hours ago, which forced me to sleep early. i'll be working out the drums this morning.

getting there.

i think i'm done arranging, except the drums.

yeah. fingers are too sore to play for the day. i guess i haven't played eight hours a day for a few years, but i'm actually really happy to get back to it. just need to get those callouses back to where they should be...

regarding the changes to the score, i'm pretty sure i'll have some kind of something up somewhere before i sleep again.

on second thought, all i've managed to do today is work my fingers down to the bone. i'm going to give them a rest and work on the score tomorrow. i've certainly been mentally writing...

i also need to do something about the clenched teeth while playing this. maybe user a soother ;)

also, you could always listen to every single song i've uploaded in reverse chronological order, if you'd like.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3JSjmqp0cbubsqYGaNbe_PBK0kh9xHD1

hey, i don't know how i managed to get 100 people to decide to subscribe to my youtube channel, but i somehow did manage to do just that. keep an eye out for signs of the apocalypse...

in the meantime, i think this calls for a celebration.

hey, listen - reality is that society is running just fine without me, and that the challenges i'm facing are not unique to me, and will become increasingly prevalent over the course of the next generation. youth unemployment in this region is pushing 30%. there are places in europe where it's pushing 50%. this is a structural level of unemployment that is likely with us permanently moving forwards. the solution is not to magically create jobs where no jobs are necessary, to dig ditches and fill them in as the old saying goes, it's to come to terms with the reality that we've already reached the technological requirements of full communism and adjust the social system to account for that reality. my generation is just unfortunate enough to be on the bleeding edge of it, where the shifts in technology are ahead of the shifts in mass consciousness. there's no future in western society beyond that realization, but there's a lot of social norms and traditions pushing against coming to terms with it. the fact is we live in a reality where we're increasingly only able to employ a small percentage of the population, and the rest is not going to have any option but to live on the wealth that the machines create, in one way or another.

there's a popular misconception that we've lost all the jobs to offshoring, but if you actually look at statistics and ask economists about it the truth will come out that the largest share of job losses are due to mechanization. mexico didn't steal your job, robots did. the robots and artificial intelligences are just getting better. i've seen a number of articles recently asking if doctors are about to be replaced by smart phones. well, i think we'll always have a place for doctors and surgeons especially - but the workload may decrease dramatically. a "family doctor" may soon be a thing of the past. the classrooms of the near future will probably not have teachers in them. &etc.

as all these shifts in technology create ever increasing levels of unemployment, we're going to have to adopt ideas like job sharing. to an extent, we're already there, with the ubiquity of part-time employment. but, again, the social system hasn't adjusted to it. perhaps, more problematically, workers movements haven't adjusted to it. demanding higher wages seems progressive, but it's masking a larger problem. from a quality of life perspective, working part-time is far better than working full-time, is it not? that's less work and more play, which ought to be the goal (i understand it isn't currently). but, it requires structural adjustments like guaranteed incomes to fill in the holes. otherwise, we need to turn the machines off - or adopt ghastly measures to decrease the population.

these are realities that we all need to come to terms with. more and more people are going to be living the way i am, out of necessity, because a prole has nothing to sell but labour, and if capital isn't buying labour then the prole simply doesn't have a way out. i'm just a little ahead of the curve in understanding these things.

the only reason it's not hitting us right now with mass movements is that there's so much wealth tied up in the older generation. i didn't get the worst hand in life, but i didn't get the best one, either. there's thousands and thousands of people in my age group in my situation, but they have family they can live with, so they're not in dire straits.

i mean, i'm sure you've seen these self checkout machines at grocery stores.

consider the consequences if every grocery store, big box chain and retail outlet let their cashiers go as obsolete in the face of new technology. well, it's gonna happen....

lol.

some cops showed up today to talk about my suicidal facebook messages. but, the context in the messages is very clear - i'm not currently suicidal. such an autonomous decision is dependent upon the outcome of the odsp evaluation in september. i was posting to prepare others for the eventuality. further, while i'm fairly certain of the outcome, i'm actually holding out hope that it will be extended. how can i be suicidal if i'm mutedly optimistic about the future, and merely planning for the worst case should it actualize?

i've already posted my logic.

it's always interesting explaining my coldly rational, detached perspective to people that seem to think they have the ability to magically project their desires onto reality.

but, you're giving up too soon! you're young!

it's not a question of giving up. that's a subjective perspective. i'm about analyzing data and coming to objective conclusions. my attitude doesn't affect the data, which clearly demonstrates that my chances of finding employment are exceedingly low. it has nothing to do with how i feel, it's just what the data states.

but, you haven't tried.

sure i have. that's how i built up my data set. why try further when the data projects a high probability of failure? it would be *this* behaviour that would be insane.

but that was in ottawa.

the conditions here are worse than in ottawa. that's why i moved here. it follows that i should spend even less time trying here.

you're just focusing on numbers and statistics, you just need to think positively and...

no. i need to focus on data. your arguments are not convincing, because you're not challenging the data, you're merely asking me to ignore it in favour of magical thinking.

*frown*

i tried to explain it, but they didn't get it. they did, however, convince me to allow a nurse to come later today to talk to me.

btw: the correct mathematical argument against my data-driven deductions is to question whether employment data is dependent. if each process is independent of the next, my conclusions collapse.

i think there is some argument for this. in fact, it even follows that if each process is independent then the probability of eventually finding a job approaches one (because any non-zero probability implies at least one success in infinitely many trials).

however, i'm convinced that the challenges are related to personal character traits, which makes each trial dependent on the last.

love the guitar tone i'm getting. dirty finger pickin' tele sound. canned through the pod, though, not a live amp.

so, i'm running through at 360. it's a little sloppy, but it's coming. i'm thinking i'll have a recording of some sort up by the end of the day. i want to bleach my hair for the vid. well, i want to bleach my hair anyways, but it's a good excuse.

so, that means the vid through old cheri amp is likely for tomorrow.

that's actually the first guitar amp i ever bought. tiny little thing. there's an interview where kim thayil explains that he records with small amps, and he name dropped cheri. i was young and took it on the drop, given there were only a few other in that price range. it's actually a great sounding little mini amp....

jumped to electric, and that pushed me up to 320. i think this will be relatively soon.

also: it seems that circumstances are going to lead me to take my own life in september or october, so i'm putting all other things on permanent hiatus and focusing solely on music, to try and get as much done as i can before i die.

head cleared, decision clarified, expecting the worst, resolved to get as much music done between now and september as i can.

that means i'm not thinking about it between now and then or wasting my time with it.

i just want to get the logic down somewhere for when (if) they find the body.

1) it does not appear as though i am going to have my disability renewed.
2) therefore, i will be unable to pay rent.
3) therefore, i will lose my studio. again.
4) i have nowhere else to store my studio.
5) therefore, i will have no way to save my studio if i am unable to pay rent to house it.
6) humans need a purpose to continue to exist and whither away without one. i have categorically rejected most accepted purposes for existence as not interesting (children, "career", partner, family, etc.). the one purpose i have is recording.
7) therefore, losing my studio would also be losing my purpose to exist.
8) therefore, i would no longer have a will to exist.
9) therefore, suicide will become desirable.

note that, questions of the desirability of labour aside, the chances of me finding employment here or elsewhere are approaching zero. i haven't had a job of any sort since 2011 and i haven't had a full time job since 2008. i have also consistently been fired from every job i've had since 2008 for being unable to show up on time. i see no use in pretending that i will be able to support myself when the evidence is abundantly clear that i will not be able to.

it follows that i'm better off maximizing the recording time i have left than i am wasting my time trying and failing to find a job i'd be fired from within a few weeks, anyways.

...or neuroticizing over a way out. there isn't one.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/julian-baggini-suicide-can-be-a-rational-choice-1912358.html

i've decided to wait.

if i only have a few months left, i don't want to waste it chasing around doctors.

i went back to the clinic to get a second rec and they suggested i go to a "crisis center" at the hospital. i'm debating it, and leaning towards doing it now rather than waiting for the decision and doing it then.

i don't know what the right diagnosis is either, but i'm certain that it's abundantly clear to any person that can analyze evidence that i'm not capable of or interested in participating in society, and anybody denying that clear and obvious truth must have a political motive in front of him.

bluntly: if you actually think i'm capable of properly functioning in this world, you're either stupid or ignorant of the facts.

i'm sick of struggling. if the system doesn't make the right decision, people are going to get hurt.

a life spent working is a life that is not worth living.

if this happens (and i'm hoping things are worked out, but, if odsp throws me off, i will almost certainly choose to end my life or do something that will place me in a jail cell for a long time), you need to think of it in terms of me ending my suffering. it will be for the best.

one day, people will look back at the barbarity of market societies and canonize those who resisted. hopefully, through suicide, as an act of defiance, i can provide inspiration for future generations.

well, that went terribly. and, all the peace and stability and happiness i've been feeling over the last few months just went up in a smoke of rage and anger and hopelessness.

some ideas floating through my mind.

1) show up at the psychiatrist's office with a butcher knife and saw my foot off in front of him. manipulating you? want me to prove otherwise, you producerist piece of fucking shit? how about we get your license taken away? ruining your career would give me more pleasure than my foot does. fucker. die. die. die.

2) taking baseball bats to the odsp building and just hanging out outside until the cops show up, and then admit it. when they release me, do it again. then again. and again. and again....

the bottom line that these fuckers have to come to is this: they can either sign my disability papers, or they can watch me kill myself and/or put me in jail, because i'm not participating in this society. it's a threat, but it's not an empty one. i'm at the end. there's no compromising. no trying to fit in. i'm on the fucking terrorists' side. this society needs to be incinerated. i'd rather bomb a walmart than work in one. and i'd rather read in a jail cell in peace than be forced to participate in the market.

300. it's getting a little challenging at this speed, but it's mostly "generally rusty" problems, like having lost the strength in the left hand to barre a chord on a pinky hammer-pull-off. the dexterity came back fast, but that didn't. thankfully, the fix is easy: practice. i think i'll probably be stuck at 300 for a few days due to that, but it will probably speed up quickly afterwards.

(several posts were lost from june 9th-17th, mostly about performing the piece on guitar. the problem is that there is active code of some sort on facebook that causes word documents to seize up and crash when pasted into them.

iirc, the write-up was something like this...

while the track is not challenging to perform at a slow tempo, it is quite challenging to perform at the tempo it's written at: eighth note at 360. so, it was necessary to practice the track before it could be recorded. i decided that it would be best to start at a slow speed, and then gradually build speed by slowly increasing the tempo. i decided that it would take a few days before i could play it at 360. of course, i updated my progress as i went. i'm not sure where i started, but the narrative picks back up again at 300.

i have a screenshot dated to june 16th at 14:18 called tricky.jpg, which is attached here. it seems to be that i was pointing out that this is the tricky part at a fast tempo. i may have also pointed out that the C# at the very top is a very big problem because it can only be reached via harmonic. and, i do recall getting around it by actually playing the harmonic, and at quite a fast tempo.)

tricky.jpg:

the sad reality nowadays is that google fails far more often than it succeeds.

uploading recent guitar demo to soundcloud

a math rock version of the three's company theme, or something. i'm now caught up. these are the kind of silly shorts that will be posted here moving forward....

https://soundcloud.com/deathtokoalas/2014-05-18a

uploading boogeyman to youtube

somebody asked me about what inspired me to write this, here's my answer.

the 09-11 are just the track numbers on the inricycled compilation (9, 11 are the intro and ending, 10 is boogeyman). that demo version was done up when i was fifteen, but is a little older and ultimately stems from being told to lock the door at night. i guess i was probably more like ten at the time. when it started getting dark at night, my mom would yell at me to go lock the door before the boogeyman came in to get us. but, she'd be a little dramatic about it. kind of a...

mom: shhh. do you hear that?
me: it's getting dark, maybe it's...
mom: it's the boogeyman! go run and lock the door before he comes in and gets us!

so, i'd get up and run to the front door and lock it, peering out to make sure there was nobody there.

i don't think i ever thought a boogeyman existed, but i didn't grow up in an affluent neighbourhood and i was well aware of the dangers of straying too far from home after night. i didn't understand much about drugs or gangs at the time, i just knew that sometimes people died of gunshot wounds outside and didn't want to be stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time. it was legitimately important to block off entrance points.

the run had a bit of a rush of adrenaline-based fear to it, because the hallway was dark. getting to the door and back could at times be a little scary.

by 15, i'd grown out of that, but the song is a memory of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gTfycvt1VU

uploading guitar demo from 2010 to soundcloud

this is another broken jam session and will come off as really simple (and it is, on some level) if you don't appreciate the subtle dissonance. regardless, it's easy to hear the stomp under it. i don't write much of it, but i'd love to start a really dirty garage rock band...

https://soundcloud.com/deathtokoalas/2010-09-19a

i'm pretty sure my last featured track got throttled starting last week. it ran up to 301, then was stuck there for several days as there was a difference of roughly 60 hits between the shown and the confirmed, which is something that's happening across multiple videos and only makes sense to me in the context of it being an error by youtube. basically, youtube doesn't seem to want to accept views from certain countries, under the argument that views from those countries must be bought.

it did push past 301 after the delay, but the hits went down drastically in ways that didn't really make sense. there were a few days where the ratio of total views to featured views was pushing 4:1, which defies any sort of logic because one has to click through the feature to get to the other videos. it only makes sense if the video is being throttled.

i hope that youtube is storing the information so it can fix it when it determines it's error. but, the feature over the last two weeks isn't exactly my best work, anyways. i'm not really upset about it coming in behind some of the other tracks. it's the *principle* of throttling, especially when it's racial profiling, that bothers me.

this track will go back up tomorrow at midnight and the timeframes are such that it will be there for an entire month. i should hopefully get some serious work done in that time frame. and i kind of expect this to be my first video to reach 1000 hits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gTfycvt1VU&list=PL3JSjmqp0cbslW9qCBKT_nEcwUt1DY0aN

got some life shit worked out today, things are continuing to come together.

1) got accepted by a psychiatrist around the corner. i'm hoping this guy can do two things for me. the first is diagnose me with something i can rely on for longer term disability - i'm thinking i'm probably clinically schizophrenic, even if it's only a problem when i'm thrust into the "real world". there is no real world. there. qed. i laugh, but it's self-deprecating. the second thing i'm thinking is that it'd be nice to have cheap, legal, easy access to marijuana. i'm actually *very* convinced that it helps keep me stable. i don't even need large doses, and i wouldn't really want to be stoned all the time, but i'm very strongly of the opinion that a bit of pot every few days is very good for mental health, and may go so far as to say i'd probably have harmed myself by now if it wasn't for the pot. further, i won't take drugs in the form of pills. i'm a hippie like that. so, if he tries to prescribe me wellbutrin or prozac or something, i won't fill the rx - i'll ask for pot instead.

2) stage one of my border documents have been approved. i think the combined governments of the united states and canada are real assholes for standing over the bridge with an ax declaring that none shall pass, but they're the fuckers with the weapons, so what to do but mutter under your breath? i've wasted almost a year of my time due to this stupidity, which isn't making anybody safer and really *should* be a political liability. but i can't even vote against it. one day, we'll tear these walls down. for now, it's relieving to be just about through the annoyance. i need to go for an interview to prove i'm not arabic, i mean a threat to security. catching the swans show is not looking likely. and there's not going to be too many more chances for it, either. ugh. fucking fascists.

uploading guitar demo from 2008 to soundcloud

going through my lo-fi demoes a few days ago, i realized that i'd already released most of them in the form of two existing demos.

the first was entitled "impressionist jazz punk" and was mid 2005. i'll be uploading it as is to bandcamp when i get there (i'm currently doing stuff from '01 and moving forward chronologically) and then deciding what should be redone. the second was a six track proverbs demo that was supposed to act as a plan for the proverbs symphony. it still will, if mildly modified. so, the bulk of the tracks won't go to the lo-fi site.

i kind of forgot about the rest. this is a jam from early '08 that i put aside for further work and forgot about.

https://soundcloud.com/deathtokoalas/2008-02-16a

yeah, this thing is playable. i'll give you a live vid of it on my mini nylon guitar, just give me a few days to polish it up.

i'm heading out to get this score printed...

thankfully, it's formatted well, unlike the last one. i'm hoping i can get a proper guitar version, however i idm it up in the end.

the time machine (midi piano mix)

this is the next 2001 period piece i'll be working on. my memory is blurry; yet, i have a vivid recollection of playing parts of it for my guitar teacher on a sunny day, where there was still snow on the ground.

it's funny how we remember seemingly irrelevant details, but i guess the atmosphere of the performance is important because the performance is. that would date it to roughly march, 2001.

i switched the piece from classical guitar to piano halfway through writing it, and vaguely remember thinking that an impossible interval had something to do with it. yet, that doesn't change the fact that it's guitar music. the counterpoint is very guitar.

i'll have to analyse the score and determine whether it's actually playable or not, or if i can get it close enough. but this one is an open palette right now in the sense that it needs to be filled out, so the early instrumentation choices are really just a suggestion.

one possible idea is that i may split it into a guitar piece to start and a piano piece to finish. i'm thinking of adding sequenced drums and a more defined, squelchy bass part.

written in early 2001. rendered june 9, 2014.

youtube's a weird system. i'm up to 90 subscribers, but i don't know anything about any of them. stranger, it seems like virtually none of them checked out my new song. i'm sending the information to almost 100 people and i'm not convinced that any of them are in my 12 hits - it seems like they're all random hits. so, why subscribe to the channel? i dunno, maybe it'll change in the next few days, but it seem to me like a youtube subscribe is some kind of act of solidarity or something.

i do suspect people are mildly confused and what they should be doing is following me on google+ if they want to follow my ranting, but i can't correct that.

i think my initial observation that youtube users have a longer attention span than bandcamp users is still valid, overall, but the average view length on those 12 views is still less than a minute meaning that the few subscribers that did check it out, if there were any, weren't actually interested, compounding my confusion.

i'm also at 5000 hits, though, which is a bit of a milestone. i just wish i knew more about people following me to understand what they're looking for.

i'm not collecting ad information, i'm just trying to build a small fan base. i don't work through a label or anything. there's no chance i'm going to play your town - even if i could get a basic band together, i couldn't really reproduce most of this stuff (which doesn't mean it can't happen, just that the live product would be drastically different. but it's not likely, and i'm not really interested in pushing for it at the moment.). there's really no wall of separation between you and i. so, if you're following me here, and you want to tell me a little about yourself and why you're following me if it's not to hear some tunes....

i think i've figured out that some of it is an implied market operation: people will subscribe with the expectation that i'll subscribe back. which is to what aim? a lot of inflated stats that prioritize networking skills over genuine interest? i'm not going to play that game. it's not about some kind of opposition to market collusion (i fully understand that 'free market' is an oxymoron), it's just that i don't see the use in having 1000 subscribers or likes or followers or whatever if they're not actually interested. it's a lie that doesn't build a real listening base. and, as a user, i don't want to sort through a cluttered feed of shit i'm not actually interested in.

some of it is obvious, and it's worst when it makes no sense. like, i got a subscribe from some bullshit trendy americana-indie band from new york that i've never heard of. nothing i do is anywhere near the genre, and i'm actually not even a fan of the style. at all. what's the use in pretending? i guess if i got the request from something i legitimately liked and respected, i'd reciprocate, but it seems outrageously contrived to do it to inflate stats. in the end, if everybody does that, we're just running on a treadmill, anyways. i want real likes, real followers, real subscribers, real views. and if the number is lower than it would be if i played the game of market collusion, that just reflects the reality of the situation - i'm not a pop artist.

anyways, i'm not going to prod. but i'd like to know what your interest in me is, if you're willing to share.

now that the song is done, i'm going to take a quick break to finish reading leviathan and then start the process of shifting off facebook to my own site, over here:

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/

i'll be using the network to check show listings, but i won't be posting here further. one of the things i'll want to do, shifting over, is set up various rss feeds.

the reason i'm shifting off is that i don't like facebook's decision to push the ui down from above. i want control over how my site looks. i want the ads removed. i'm sorry they don't agree with that.

but, there's lots of good reasons to get the data off facebook, too.

the best way to reach me is by email. if you don't have my email, i probably don't want you to have it. if you think i do want you to have it, msg me to find out if your intuition is correct.

i have several pages up, so it's going to take some time to transfer things. i'll be following a scorched-earth policy: delete everything as i transfer it to my own site. if there's something here you want saved, now's the time to save it.

what will remain will be a collection of rss dumps, because so long as people continue to use facebook it's kind of necessary to have something.

i think the long run solution has to be some kind of feed aggregator that works at the rss level. i think people are going to end up reading their twitter and facebook and youtube feeds all at the same time. it's probably actually a "woah. you can do that?" type thing. i'd guess almost everybody would switch to it if they knew it was possible. the idea was catching on for people merging msn, icq and etc right before facebook took over.

an interface that could cross-link the comments systems would be really ideal, especially if it could run standalone. and, it could conceivably kill a few sites off that don't want to play by the rules (facebook being the worst).

so, i also want greater control over the serving mechanism. right now, it sounds a little crazy, but wait for it.

i'm actually surprised that what i'm looking for doesn't exist in any kind of stable form. the idea has certainly been experimented with, but it's all for profit companies that fall apart when they realize there's no money in it. further development seems to be geared towards ipad type apps (which i'm never going to go for) and smart phones, which i'll never really get used to. i want a desktop product. fuck the trends...

i only use a handful of social media sites. if i were to build it myself, it would be very basic and never updated. but i'd be happy to throw the software out, open source, for further development.
one thing at a time. i don't even know how to get appspot to send out rss yet.

specifically: i don't want a ticker on a website, or multiple feeds on one page. just a simple, aggregated feed that i can interact with - and preferably through a standalone program that blocks ads and scripts.

it's the most basic, least visual, low return thing you could imagine.

and something like it is going to define how this shit works five years from now.

uploading stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides to youtube

and, it's up at youtube, too.

i was considering doing a screenshot capture of me running through the 83 cubase tracks that come together in this track and slowly collapsing the tree into an organized collection of ten group tracks to the main out because i thought it would be sort of epic to run through that level of complexity, but i decided in the end that it would just be an ad for the software.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9cIRP7ml5c

note that that is in addition to the compilation of midi/vst tracks, which should otherwise have a similar tracklisting to the jjjjjjjjjjjjj record.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/thru

stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (final album mix)

this completed live version will also front the 2001 "serious period" album. i was filing the serious shit under jjjjjjjjj (there's nine there) at the time. it's a sort of tongue-in-cheek self parody at the idea of writing serious music. 'cause if i was ever going to commission a piece, i'd have to get rid of surnames and superfluous syllables and just shorten it to the basic "j", just to get the point across about rejecting anything formal. i was tripping out into some rather silly number theory...

anyways, that's the opening track. the second will be some fun to try and put together, but the others should be done fairly quick now that i have some hardware/software that can deal with it.

written late 2000 & early 2001. minor instrumentation changes to facilitate a small wind section were implemented in late april, 2014. live guitars were layered into the final version over may 2014. completed on june 6, 2014.

stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (final single mix)

this is the final mix, without as many lead parts as i was thinking at one point, and without the vocals i considered adding, but with more than enough atmospheric additions to make the live recording worthwhile. it will end up opening the ep of remixes of this track that i posted to jan 10, 2001 and also end up opening the front of this compilation of material written over 2001, which will be the main album of the period.

i had some bad luck recording this. hopefully, the other stuff gets out a little faster.

written late 2000 & early 2001. minor instrumentation changes to facilitate a small wind section were implemented in late april, 2014. live guitars were layered into the final version over may 2014. completed on june 6, 2014.

publishing stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (inri043)

this is one of the tracks that i can't date well. i do, however, remember working on it during the winter, which means it must have been late '00 or early '01. i'm going to consequently deduce that it must have been what i was working on over the 2000 christmas break and date it coming out right after it.

actually, i have another reason to date it in early '01 rather than late '00: the introductory piano part was recorded live into my notation program on my dx100, which i was given over christmas (maybe a little before; it was a cheap garage sale pickup) to act as a controller for my recently broken jx-8p, that i had tried to take apart over the summer to clean a sticky key (a common problem with mid-80s roland analog synths) but failed and left keyless. it's still keyless. yet, the dx still drives it....

that introductory piano part formed the basis of the track, which built itself up fairly quickly. somewhere, i lost the nwc file by saving it as midi, which ruined all the formatting. it's been sitting on my drive ever since.

why put together seven different midi versions of the same track, and sequence them after a polished recorded version? well, this was never actually meant to be computer music. i was just composing something the old fashioned way with the intent of later giving it to some musicians to play. that never happened. what did happen was that i found myself playing it back on multiple sound cards over many years, trying to make it sound as good as possible in the short run - until i could finally get the chance to sit down and actually record it. while each of the different renders has it's strong and weak points, i ultimately don't feel that they form a total order. something i thought about doing was recording tracks independently on different cards and then pasting them together, but that would have just created another dozen incomparable mixes. rather than arbitrarily pick one, i decided to just upload all of them.

in hindsight, i think the format is interesting in itself in terms of it being a psychological experiment with sound. the differences from track to track are sometimes inaudible and sometimes extremely noticeable. stringing it all together in a row like this is challenging to any listener in the sense that it rips apart the process of becoming familiar with a piece. it means listening to exactly the same song through multiple different sound libraries. i think your brain would have to interpret that as a sort of a trip, especially when it comes to trying to build associations in sound within tracks that are both similar and different sounding, soundcard wise. i think that might be part of the reason i had so much difficulty isolating tracks in the first place.

so, listening to the ep through all the way is likely to be a bit disorienting and might ultimately be a strange experience. however, if you like the track for what it is as a collection of overlapping sequences of notes then i hope you get something out of the process of comparing and contrasting the renders together.

i have included the original midi file as a bonus item in the download, if you want to play with it on your own. the added guitar sections in the final version are recent additions and have not been written out.

written late 2000 & early 2001. the renders present here are all from the early months of 2014. minor instrumentation changes to facilitate a small wind section were implemented in late april, 2014. live guitars were layered into the final version over may 2014. as always, please use headphones.

credits:
j - electric piano, programming, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, vocals, vocoders, digital effects & treatments, digital wave editing, composition.

the rendered electronic orchestras variously include piano, bass, synth bass, distorted electric guitar, clean electric guitar, steel string acoustic guitar, nylon string classical guitar, sitar, violin, viola, cello, contrabass, french horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, oboe, english horn, bassoon, synthesizers, clarinet, flute, piccolo, xylophone, glockenspiel, tubular bells, jazz drum kit, hand drums and electronic drum kit.

released january 10, 2001

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/stuck-in-the-middle-of-an-alley-closing-in-on-all-sides

...or do i want vocals after all?

the track wasn't written with any. i didn't have plans to specifically include or exclude, but my work in the period was generally instrumental.

pretty much everything else on this midi music disc is going to be instrumental.

i was just thinking that some vocals would carry the piece, but it came out of humming a part. hence the melodyne thing. that extrapolated itself outwards into an idea about urban decay.

but this is cliched.

....and i don't think i have enough words to carry the length of the track, and the end is striking me as vocally daunting, because i am not a singer and do not generally sing. it's just these big power chords that would need "real singing" if any at all. leaving it empty negates the purpose.

i guess i was thinking of saturating it with guitars, but i'm avoiding that, too.

i'm going to listen to it 100 more times. sporadically, perhaps.

i'm getting the feeling, though, that this is done.

lyrics for stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides

whisper:
claus
ter
phob
bic
lies (life)  (1/5) - delay/decay - switching pan

centre - descending - vocals
to run and to hide and to
in a ball on the floor

descending countermelody:
how to be alive,
when it's all collapsing on all sides

WATCH IT FALL NOW
(HORNS KICK IN)

(background:
the falling debris feels like fear/love/pain/hope)

yeah, that's the last version of this. it'll be coming down in the next few hours, as i get the vocal melody in.

so, i need to figure out how to use melodyne, next. i've never pitch shifted my own voice (i've never had to), but i did use some more crude methods to modify sean's voice back in the day. that's not really the goal, though...

what i want to do is convert the vocal melody line into a synthesizer part, then vocode it back into the vocal part. i suppose i could write it out, but because i'm not the best singer i'm hoping it will let me microtone it precisely. that is to say, that i'm really looking for the audio to midi capability in order to ensure the vocoder is NOT in tune. i know, i'm always overcomplicating things, but i wouldn't be me if i just did it the easy way.

right now, the goal is to leave the synthesized section in the instrumental version.

first, i need to actually get the vocal melody in...

i'm going to have to play with this, but i think it should be possible to convert it to raw frequency.

yeah, i'm noticing it. what i'm experiencing is that hits from certain countries in the former soviet union and east asia especially (but countries outside the "first world" in general) get erased by some kind of software that is probably designed to prevent hit buying. i can't speak for you but i'm certainly not buying hits, i just get a lot of traffic from international news agencies (and a flip through my public google+ profile will make it obvious why).

basically, it seems like what youtube is doing is saying "if you have a high amount of traffic from outside of europe and north america then you must be buying hits, and those hits will be erased.". which is heavy-handed and counterproductive. i can get behind schemes designed to prevent view buying, but the algorithm seems to be making things worse by hyper-americanizing the site. i mean, i don't even live in the united states...

that being said, i can get my head around some bad implementation. bugs. fine. but, it seems to be getting worse and not better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d09EwcYc5k

this is close to a final mix. there may be some minor mix adjustments, and there will be a central vocal part, and there might be a guitar solo at the end, but if you want to say something that i'll almost certainly ignore, your time window is almost closed.

uploading stuck.. to the scratchpad

i'll probably update this several times over the next few hours. the edits are localized to within the first 1:30. the thing is i'm at the point with the track where it requires so much processor speed real time that i simply can't reproduce without bouncing (which i hate doing), so i'm forced to mix it down just to listen to it....

https://googledrive.com/host/0B5JfVE9XTZikMS1zek9ER0xSU1E/scratchpad/

i just gotta say it one more time...

i don't care if you like bland, repetitive techno. i don't. really.

just stop deluding yourself into thinking it's futuristic or defines a generation or something. it hit it's peak of creativity about 1993 and has been cycling in circles ever since.

techno, today, is a *retro* fashion. k?

there's a number of rock forms that only make sense when placed after techno, as fusion only makes sense when positioned after jazz (but in a real sense was also both the end and high point of jazz). where we're standing in 2014, we've even managed to exhaust just about any kind of interesting electronic hybrids, which happened some time in the mid 00s.

so, it's like.....sorry, kids, but techno is something that already happened, and you missed it. why don't you take some time to explore some more contemporary forms, instead of getting lost in a concept of the future that is properly dated to c. 1983?

here lies techno. while there was initially much promise, and many victories, the end was meandering and dull.

rip.

techno.
(1975-2005)

yeah. i've decided i'm not going to find the remaining furniture i need in here, so i'm going to wait until the beginning of august and take a shopping cart of wood home with me. i'll need to varnish it. and i'll probably get a drill, too.

i'm hoping i can find a coffee table before then, but i'm looking for something that's roughly 14x40 and they're just not out there. people want these gross square coffee tables. or glass ones. yuck. if not, it should cost me something like $6 to build one and polyurethane over it.

there's this kind of enclave that i wanted to put shelving into but my initial plan isn't the best one. there's a window in the corner. i was just going to put shelving in square over the window, which would eliminate the need for curtains and make it harder to break in here. i mean, there's bars, but that's merely a disincentive. i've learned over the spring that access to this window is important, due to the air upstairs. so, i'm going to frame around it, instead, and get some curtains after all. that's three walls of framing that has to go around the window. i'm thinking i could probably do it for around $50, which is considerably cheaper than trying to cram a dozen oddly shaped bookcases in - and better because there's no wasted space. i suppose it's sort of a gift to the unit, in the end, because i couldn't really take it with me. but i plan on staying for a while...

similarly for the corner shelving. i posted some pictures. the easiest thing to do will probably be to get some studs and just screw the shelves in, but it's going to depend on scrap wood from the other projects.

i want to build a simple three story desk to put near my bed to put a speaker unit up top, the laptop in the middle and various documents underneath. i've been hoping i can find something, but the space is only thirteen inches across.

the last thing is a cd shelf. the big problem has been "how do i get that much wood here". if i do it at once, i'll take the home depot cart back for the hour walk....

i'll just have to measure it all up in a few weeks.

which means i'm under budget for the first time since february and may be able to go catch a show, if an interesting one is happening this side of the river. actually, i'm still hoping i can catch swans in a few weeks. depends on customs. it'll be a few days one way or another. should put the cash aside for that....

so, i'm used to losing a few days around the start of the month. wish i didn't lose a few around the end of it, too.

i'm back on this track. i want it done soon, but i don't want to push it out prematurely. i had given myself the first, but that's off. hopefully, it's a by the end of the week thing.

mods are going to be minor, though. it's weird how you can have an idea, then listen to it over and over in your head, until you realize that it's already there in the first place. i guess it's sort of like listening to a complicated piece of music until you get it. it's just weird when it's your own. but the mix you make is not the mix you imagine, so you need to get used to it just the same.

it happens a lot with drums. i'll imagine it with a deep bass, listen to it 100 times asking "do i need to deepen the bass?" and eventually conclude the bass is pretty deep, so long as the listener has listened to it enough to be conditioned to it. meaning that the random listener out there with random co-ordinates may not get the deep bass on first listen, but the proportions will make sense after the 50th. which is what the mixing aim needs to be.

....because i have no choice to condition myself as well, because i'm ultimately listening to the mix the first time as well, regardless of how much time i've spent imagining the track in my mind. i wouldn't suppose that most people would envision the process that way...

rap news 25

i live in canada, where there's more or less a monopoly on lines in any given area. when i was in ottawa, it was rogers for cable and bell for dsl. i'm now in windsor, across the river from detroit, where cogeco owns all the cable lines.

it's kind of wasteful and stupid to suggest running competing lines side by side. but, our regulators have agreed that a monopoly is anti-competitive, so they've forced the line owners to rent the lines out to smaller companies. there are a few quirks to going with a smaller company, but one of the things they offer is cheaper access rates at lower speeds. ultimately, it just exposes how much of a rip-off the major carriers are: how else could a smaller company turn a profit by buying bandwidth from them, then undercutting them on it?

the process of moving down here and switching had me think a lot about it. is an internet line a public good? the analogy that keeps coming through my mind is public roads. we even have the language of an "information superhighway". there are some fringe opinions that disagree, but we mostly all agree that roads should be owned by the public and maintained collectively through taxation. one of the reasons we mostly all believe this is that it provides equal access for everybody. the idea that large companies could take over our roads and start charging us whatever they want for whatever access they advertise is inconceivably backwards to most of us.

it's one thing to stand up against this and argue that things are fine as they are, but the machinery of private property laws is staggered against us. should we not change our perception of what the internet is, it's inevitable that these sorts of changes will take place. what that means is that it's necessary to articulate an alternate vision of how internet lines are owned in order to maintain net neutrality.

lol. my youtube monthly stats increases are approaching the golden mean. :o.

i hit 4500 views over the night. that's not bad for 5 months and no promo outside of posting to youtube itself. if i maintain a modest growth ratio of 1.2 per month (less than the golden mean), i'll be at 30,000 hits by year end and be averaging about 1721 hits a day by the end of next year. that would be a startling 50000+ hits in dec, 2015 alone.

i know better than to think i can expect unending growth. i'm not some kind of delusional liberal capitalist, or something. and i'll state again that i don't really care about racking up hit stats.

but i'm at least succeeding in generating traffic.

i'm not sure what's going on outside. when i was out there, it sounded like a race track around the corner. air show? several lawn mowers? don't know. but, sitting inside, the waveforms of the different motors are expanding and overlapping with each other and harmonizing, and it sounds like an ambient noise festival.

maybe i just wish i was at an ambient noise festival.

it's nice out.

hurry up, customs.

nice walk yesterday, although it knocked me out. i guess i needed a good night's worth of sleep. it's been a long time since i can remember a good 9 hours in one stretch.

those cheap shoes aren't working out. i suppose i shouldn't be surprised, although i also think i'm abusing them. they probably would have lasted the summer if i didn't take them on these periodic six or eight hour walks. as it is, they're already softening up on the bottom. i did pick up a pair of skate shoes a few months ago, but wanted to save them until the spring rains stopped. the whole purpose of the cheap shoes was really to wear in spring and fall. so, i guess it's time to switch over. the cheapies were two for one, so i guess i have another pair for the fall. looking at them now, it's pretty obvious they weren't really made for walking.

i got this rare craving for a burger last night. it's something that hits every few months. raw meat is not allowed in the house, so it's not something that's in my regular diet. the few times a year i want a burger, i go buy one. i remembered seeing a local burger place, so i took a walk around the corner....

"motor burger". well, i'm in detroit. sounds like a good place for what i imagine a local detroit burger should be: greasy and messy, with a side of transmission fluid, but that's kind of what i wanted.

it turns out it was actually a sort of bourgeois gourmet burger palace, which makes these weird upper class burgers out of goat cheese and gluten-free buns, then charges upwards of $15 for them. i was tired, and jonesing hard, so i forked out the $22 for a bacon cheeseburger and a non-hydrogenated, baked, organically grown poutine.

i gotta say it was good.

and i guess that's the new detroit.

hi

a while back when i was in ottawa i sent you something for the afterburners 2 comp. i'm actually happy it's up there, but i'm wondering if you could do two things for me.

1) the artist name is jessica murray, not jason parent. technically jason and jessica are the same person, but i'm transgendered so i'd rather the female identifier.

2) it'd be great if you just tossed a link to jasonparent.bandcamp.com (i know it's confusing, but i don't think bandcamp has the right redirects to update the domain if i change it so i'm sticking with it) on the track page so people know where to find me.

i'm in windsor now, but good luck with bruised tongue moving forwards.

j

ugh. this new "facebook for iphone" shit is just horrific. it was bad enough losing 50% of the page to ads, now we just lost another 25% to a sneaky ploy by facebook to get pages to prominently display likes as ads along the sides.

i think this is sort of facebook admitting that people don't actually click on likes, meaning the medium really isn't useful to advertisers, meaning their entire reason to exist is up in the air. the increasingly aggressive nature of facebook advertising is a function of the inefficacy of advertising on social media. but, facebook seems to be run by legitimate Corporate Idiots, and it's consequently likely to get worse. i do predict that the ads are going to be what turns facebook into a ghost site in the end. if it's not already halfway there.

i like the rss capabilities. i repeat that it was the rss, not the people, that dragged me in - and late at that, not until 2010. and, so long as "content generators" (which in my case mostly means show promoters in the detroit/windsor area) continue to use facebook, i'll continue to use it as well. the corollary of that is that so long as people go looking for these sorts of sites, i feel i should maintain it.

but, cutting me down to 25% of the screen for my actual content is too much. to me, that makes the site unusable. i'm going to be converting this page (and the rest of my facebook pages, too) into an rss dump over the next few weeks, by emulating the timeline page at my appspot site.

there's another benefit to getting off these scripted sites, which is that they badly waste hardware resources. i shouldn't need 500 mb of ram to fully load this page back to 1981. it can be easily reproduced with an html table and an iframe in a way that could be loaded easily on a 386.

i'm going to leave the rss dump because people are going to keep checking the site for these sorts of things for the near future, but also because facebook could still turn things around. but, for right now, the future of facebook seems to be a dead zone of advertising scripts, where corporate servers communicate to each other across a barren landscape.

don't look for a replacement, either. the era of a centralized internet was thankfully short lived. the initial nature of the internet as decentralized and targeted to specific interests seems to be reasserting itself. that's something to be excited about.

for me, as a musician, that means the replacement ought to be something like spotify. it's not clear yet which network is going to win out. but note that there's a paywall there, which means i'm not interested. soundcloud is awful. so, i'd like to see bandcamp increase it's networking aspect. however it stabilizes, that's where the future is. and, likewise, expect a gamer network and a fashion network and a ...

the model to look towards is something like youtube, which will probably not be supplanted as the video networking site (unless it fucks up like facebook has). in the end, i think google did get it right, but not the way it meant to.

so, i'm not signing off, but i'm mutating outwards; i'm realizing this host is dead, discarding the exoskeleton and growing into a new one.

the time machine (midi nylon guitar mix)

this is the next 2001 period piece i'll be working on, hopefully starting early next week. my memory is blurry; yet, i have a vivid recollection of playing parts of it for my guitar teacher on a sunny day, where there was still snow on the ground.

it's funny how we remember seemingly irrelevant details, but i guess the atmosphere of the performance is important because the performance is. that would date it to roughly march, 2001.

i switched the piece from classical guitar to piano halfway through writing it, and vaguely remember thinking that an impossible interval had something to do with it. yet, that doesn't change the fact that it's guitar music. the counterpoint is very guitar.

i'll have to analyse the score and determine whether it's actually playable or not, or if i can get it close enough. but this one is an open palette right now in the sense that it needs to be filled out, so the early instrumentation choices are really just a suggestion.

one possible idea is that i may split it into a guitar piece to start and a piano piece to finish. i'm thinking of adding sequenced drums and a more defined, squelchy bass part.

for now, this is what the track sounded like as i was writing it. i've been careful to use the same scorewriter and same soundcard as i was using at the time of writing.

written in early 2001. rendered may 29, 2014.

my song of the next two weeks might initially come off as a young teenager emulating a nirvana deconstruction, but it's actually closer to pearl jam's punk rock underbelly. the best pearl jam tracks were always the punk tracks, and this record is the better of the early ones when it comes to that. looking back, i point to yield as their high point, but it wasn't out yet in 1996.

(relevant tracks: my very first impression specifically, but the lead guitar style in the early demos is drawn partially from mccready as a minor but noticeable influence (as well as some of mccready's influences, most obviously hendrix, and maybe a touch of page, although i was never much of a zeppelin fan) and this continues moving forwards quite a ways. there's also the flowing bass style, that i'll actually draw a primary influence from jim creeggan (who?) in relation to but that drew me to ament by similarity and is noticeable in the early demos and for years afterwards.)

alter-reality update:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo-3WJVCvsk&list=PL3JSjmqp0cbslW9qCBKT_nEcwUt1DY0aN

i've recently received several requests for collaboration, which i've turned down because i'm a control freak. it's just a legitimate lack of interest in the idea of collaboration. i need to be in control of my art. sorry.

but i'm going to try to work with the idea. maybe i'm teasing you. but, if we're having fun that's what's important, right?

i'm going to start uploading rough ideas to my google drive space. those ideas will disappear as they mutate. but, i'm going to post them here and ask for input on them, and ideas that you think could better them.

i need to be up front: i'm probably going to ignore you. so, it's just like the democracy we have in real life. i mean, don't start thinking you have any kind of actual power, but it's always fun to pretend you do.

so, this is my messy industrial jazz catastrophe that i've been playing with for the last month and is about to go into what i call "post-production". what that means, to me, is that i'm going to listen to it dozens and dozens of times - until my mind starts to mutate it. then, i'm going to start trying to find ways to synthesize those mutated sounds my brain creates.

put another way, this is when the track goes through it's atmospheric industrial phase, and picks up car doors slamming and hammers hitting glass windows and noise generators squelching out strange pitches and weird scifi effects and etc.

i've got some ideas, i just need my brain to solidify them for me. but if it were up to you, how would you warp the fuck out of this?

https://googledrive.com/host/0B5JfVE9XTZikMS1zek9ER0xSU1E/scratchpad/

also, the temp mix is done, i'm into building overdubs and doing post-production.

i just want to get the point across, so the word gets out.

i need to reiterate that i post a lot at rt, al jazeera and other global intersections. that's how i'm getting traffic from across the world.

unfortunately, the google algorithms are interpreting that as bought views, and while, again, i'll state that buying views wouldn't get me anything besides a lot of confused sheep, it's obvious that i'm not buying 4 views from south korea or whatever else.

what's setting the trigger off is the ratio. less than half of my views over the year are from the united states (although us + uk + can make up a bit more than half). according to google's filters, that's impossible without buying views.

and i claim that's blatantly racist.

what's going to happen over time is that google is going to slowly delete most of these views - most zealously the ones from southeast asia, russia, the middle east and africa.

what has to happen is that youtube needs to change how it tries to catch bought views, because what it's doing right now is just erasing 80% of the planet from it's watch stats.

more to the point, i guess, is that i'm *not* advertising to an american-centric audience, but largely to one outside the united states. my views would not be popular in that country.

....and, i mean, i'm not even from the united states. it's sort of ridiculous to expect me to get mostly american traffic when i neither live there nor am interested in their culture, but rather rant a whole lot about how evil they are.

google is notoriously difficult to contact, but they do react to negative information when they hear it, so talk amongst yourselves. it'll get back to them.

the reality is that a canadian news analyst commenting heavily over global news sources should expect to generate a global audience, and google has their head in their ass about it if their algorithm interprets that as fraudulent due to the views being less than 50% american.

i need to stop thinking about it, though. it really doesn't matter. it's just pissing me off on the principle of it.

i always have a helluva time mixing down power chords because i want a wall of sound through a complicated mess of multiple distortions, each mixed to hone in on it's own frequency. i can usually settle for a basic bass/mid/treble split, through three differently equalized distortions.

it took me all night to get those three tracks set up, but i think it's done. i'll have to double check in the morning. needs time to set.

so, i'm done for the night. i should hopefully be able to start on some final overdubs tomorrow.

getting there.

i'm going to try a different approach in the mix. i spent years and years working in cool edit. not audition. and not the multitrack version. just basic, audacity style cool edit. what i'd do is i'd just paste tracks on top of each other. it's a subtle difference in algorithm between "mixing" and "synthesizing". it's this production trick that makes some of my ambient pieces sound so thick and lush through a set of good headphones.

the reality is just that it was a function of what i had available. i couldn't run multitrack software well with the hardware i had, and my four-track tape recorder was just too noisy for me. so, if i wanted 8 or 16 or more tracks, that was the only way to really do it.

when i finally pried myself away from this and forced myself to figure out a modern recording interface, i kind of lost the open intuition of the wave editor. when you use the recording studio as a creative tool, the linear nature of recording into a wave editor v building tracks up in the normal way affects the construction process. there's this absolute free reign in overdubs, because you're zooming in to a specific time coordinate and pasting it over, rather than dealing with this structure broken into bars and notes. and, if an idea extends beyond it's bounds, the bounds merely extend the idea; that's how six minute tracks became half hour ones.

i'll probably never break with that entirely. if you listen to the segues in the first movement of the proverbs symphony, you can hear that they're cut up and fucked with. i'm likely to get more freaky with this, not less freaky with it.

the drawback of working in linear editors is that it's mostly destructive, in the sense that it's difficult to go back to a previous point in time unless you take very close notes and are sort of neurotic about putting everything aside, incrementally. that's the reason i forced myself to get out of it.

so, i don't really want to go back to that, but i do want to implement some open editing strategies into the standard multitrack recording approach. all the time i spent listening to the old stuff over the last few months has me remembering how useful it can be in getting certain raw sounds and effects across.

so, i'm going to start taking some of the sounds out, warping them in editors, and pasting them back in where they were. that will allow me to utilize some of those synthesis techniques without losing the flexibility of cubase.

i just hope it actually sounds the way i expect it to. if not, the good old wave editor could get a bit of a return to heavier and more central usage.

that being said, i'm not dealing with 8s or 16s or even 32s anymore. i just passed 70 tracks. it'll be over 100 when i'm done, i'm sure. that's on a piece under ten minutes and is about average over the last little while.

and it's not hard to understand why it takes so long, when i explain it like that i guess. that's not five people doing 100 tracks in parallel, it's one person slowly building up 100 tracks over ten minutes. and, in a longer piece of 20-30 minutes, that's pushing more like 300.

the older editor-based stuff would rarely get over 100 tracks on a half hour piece, although i'd bet a few got close to it. i had real limitations on hard drive space. remember when 20 gb was a big hard drive? it didn't seem so big, not even then. but, now there's really no limits...and i'm not about to impose artificial ones.

i lost a few days due to a nasty neck ache that required a lot of sleeping. i'm still not really clear on what happened, but i've narrowed it down to either:

a) i picked up a virus from not using soap to wash my hands while making eggs. we all do this, because we're all lazy. i need to be more careful.

b) multiple sclerosis. this isn't random. i've been hearing about being high risk since i was a toddler, and i do get weird facial tics and random muscle spasms rather regularly. where the pain is (where my spine meets my brain) could very well be a lesion. but, if true, existing medical science couldn't actually do anything about it except waste a lot of my time. so, whatever. it's mostly gone away. good enough for now....

i'm feeling alert enough at this point to get back to it tonight. i think i'm still on course to finish the track by the first.

you know, something else that happened right before my back went up in flames was that i switched from folgers to maxwell house. and i drink around a pot of extremely strong coffee a day, so it's not outside the realm of possibility. pot two is coming up, we'll have to see how that works out...

but, what i wanted to post was this:

<phil hartman>

MAXWELL HOUSE! COFFEE SO STRONG, IT WILL MAKE YOUR NECK HURT SO BADLY, THAT YOU'LL BE COMPLETELY CONVINCED YOU HAVE M.S.

</phil hartman>

also, why isn't there a "bill clinton killed phil hartman" conspiracy theory?

weird that i can hear this tonight but couldn't hear it last night or the night before. it's richie hawtin, specifically. he'll be on another hour.

at first, i thought it was a house party, so i took a walk around the neighbourhood planning to crash it. yeah, i'll do that. well, listen, if you're going to turn the music up loud enough that i can hear it in my apartment, i'll interpret that as an invite; if i'm listening to your music anyways, i'd like to come in and dance, thank you.

but, as i started walking around, i started realizing it was coming from a rather large distance away because i could hear cheering in the background. it was the cheering that dissuaded me; must be a hefty cover. the bass seemed rather close, though. i guess it was roaring in between the houses...

i also realized that the dj actually wasn't very interesting, and it wasn't worth stumbling around trying to find.

i assumed it was probably the casino in downtown windsor, not across the river in detroit. that is really ridiculously loud....

http://www.movement.us/

yeah. i'll be ok. hopefully it goes away soon, though.

it hasn't really improved, but i've gotten used to it. also, i'm developing a sore throat, which leads me to conclude that i've picked up a virus. this is pretty intense for the flu, though....

...and the truth is the only vector i can conceive of over the last week would be those eggs. so, bird flu? maybe....

i'll see what i feel like when the sun comes up.

my neck needs rest, but my brain is wide awake. so, read.

i'm finding myself in far greater agreement with hobbes than i ever thought i would be, and am actually seeing him produce a lot of the same sorts of arguments i'm always throwing at ancaps. hobbes would agree that a society based around markets and contracts would require a state to enforce those markets and contracts, rendering the vision of classical liberalism (today pushed by anarcho-capitalists) a sort of contradiction in terms - precisely agreeing with myself and other anarchists, who don't think anarchy and capitalism are compatible with each other.

of course, hobbes would not conclude that markets and contracts (and property and currency) should be abolished, as i would. instead, he'd argue in favour of a totalitarian state that forces actors to carry out their promises.

but i'm a little surprised how much i'm actually identifying with somebody that's always been presented to me as the exact opposite of everything i've ever believed in or stood for.

these are the existing stats on my top video. i've pointed out repeatedly that buying views would not help me, due to the fact that i'm an abstract artist and have no commercial potential or potential to herd a flock. but these stats make it clear they aren't bought. you'd think it would make more sense to run it against poisson or something (perhaps some research is necessary to get the right distribution, poisson strikes me as useful in finding the rare event of a full play) to determine if the data fits a reasonable shape, rather than to just be all racist about it.

it's that one algerian hit i want, not the hundreds of dumb americans that get confused after 0:07. i'd rather they delete the american hits, and let me keep the algerian one.

we'll have to see what they do or don't do with this, but it seems like all those hits outside of the first world - in turkey and south africa and elsewhere - will be declared fake.

because they don't actually exist.

i'm noticing that the youtube algorithm is basically racist, in that it rejects any hits from outside of the "first world".

sorry, white men from california. i post regularly on videos discussing global affairs. those hits from russia are legit.

in your world, nobody in russia actually uses the internet, i guess.

i ultimately don't really care. youtube views are not a meaningful currency to an obscure artist that is about substance over style. like anybody else, it makes sense for me to maximize the potential audience. but, i'd rather have one quality hit than ten thousand people that listen for five seconds. see, the unfortunate reality, though, is that the latter is necessary to get the former.

but, people should be aware that youtube isn't actually really cracking down on fake hits, it's just applying a type of racial profiling, and it's going to negatively affect people with an actual global reach, by turning audiences outside of the first world into non-entities.

in a sense, it's sort of what we all already knew: the tech industry doesn't think the rest of the world actually exists.

ouch.

neck is very stiff. has me paranoid about paralysis. but i'm hoping i just leaned on it the wrong way. will give it a few hours to heal before i freak out.

i took a break from mixing this morning to make some eggs, which gave me some heartburn and forced me to lie down. i woke up a few hours later barely able to move, with difficulty swallowing & etc.

see, it's been suggested to me more than once that i'm high risk for developing MS. i've had these periodic facial tics for as long as i can remember, but it's on the other side of the neck. i'm a little worried that something "broke" on the other side.

for now, i'm going to try to breathe slowly and just basically not move for a few hours.

so, i've become convinced that i will eventually snap my own sternum in the process of stretching, the blood splinters will travel to my heart and i'll die on the floor in a pool of my own blood. things are constantly snapping in there. it's just a matter of time.

but i can't just not stretch. no, really. try it some time. nobody can accomplish this task.

so, i've resigned myself to my own frailty, and patiently await the outcome.

hey, i always said i wouldn't make it to 25.

i was shocked when i made it to 30.

i suppose my track record on this prediction is not good, but i consider it exceedingly unlikely that i'll get to 40.

in some imaginary state of nature that never actually existed, i would have been eaten by lions before i turned ten. no, really, i would have. so, i'm already way ahead, thanks to the technology.

better to quit when i'm ahead. wait.

uploading first movement (demo) to soundcloud

this is the guitar run through of the first movement of the proverbs symphony, as it was initially written (and demoed in early 2007). note that this version is less than seven minutes and is written to be performed live, whereas the completed movement is over seventeen minutes and would be impossible to reproduce without an orchestra of guitarists.

https://soundcloud.com/deathtokoalas/proverbs-symphony-movement-1-winter-2007

...and the memories come back: it was written as a synth-guitar part, in the sense of being meant to be played over a keyboard. so, i'll have to put the sequencer section back in.

that means i'm moving to a temporary mixing stage for the day. the remainder of the track is basically production & vocals. that may mean adding some extra tracks, but it's flourishes.

i might have it done by the weekend. the 1st, for sure. the next track is going to be a process as well, before i rapidly shoot through the rest of '01.

the last prewritten section isn't playable. i'd have to split it into multiple tracks, then use weird tunings on all of them.

the awkward moment when you realize you read your own sheet music wrong.

hey, it was 15 years ago.

uploading the lost symphony to soundcloud

when finally completed, the trivial group sequence will consist of a 2-cd arranged in four thematically linked "symphonies", of which two are currently complete and one is partly complete. this is a live play through of the second half of the third piece and the entirety of the fourth.

this was written over 2004 and yet has not been recorded in any significant form. i went through a long period from '04 to '07 where i was convinced this piece (and some others i was writing at the time) required a drummer and refused to record until i could find one. i couldn't find one, which put me into a fit of depression and led to writers block & etc. eventually, i just bought an electronic kit with the goal of playing it myself.

however, i then skipped over it because i felt i was dragging on the relationship it was about on just a bit too far. time to move on, kind of thing. it had outlived it's relevance, without making it to track.

i'll be recording this (finally) over the upcoming months. for now, here's a messy demo of it.

https://soundcloud.com/deathtokoalas/the-lost-symphony

done for the night.

day.

what is time?

the rhythm parts are now almost done. i've been bouncing around between all these weird tunings...

...but the last rhythm sections are connected to some acoustic parts, which should be done tomorrow.

will have to change the strings and etc in the morning.

afternoon.

i also need to record some live drums, somehow. then: leads, vocals, production. getting there...

seems like somebody had an urge to do a townsend impersonation

i'm not picky about acoustics. it's the percussive sound i want, i can always put some reverb on it. so i'll get a cheap one...

i could always try to reglue it, but the split looks messy.

gah. on second thought, it looks like the head has been glued back together.

which may provide an answer to the question of where my uncased guitars went.

the glue job was weak, neck is going to crack in time so i should get these tracks down immediately...

my acoustic works! yay!

i was worried about it for a long time, because it seemed like i had just demoed the intonation by dragging it across the country in a canadian spring. going from ottawa to new brunswick to manitoba to alberta to bc to alberta and back to ontario, across rainforests and deserts and mountains, from cold to hot, from dry to damp, and in a little nylon gig case the whole time, and in a short amount of time, seemed to have left it in an unplayable state. it was in the unfortunate state of being unable to produce an E that sounded the same across different strings, no matter how closely i tuned it.

but, i changed the nut on it and left it in a weird string configuration - i had a heavy gauge in the D position, and a light gauge in the G position - and then got evicted and completely forgot about it, as it sat in a basement, alone, for two years.

i don't remember exactly what i was thinking, but whatever intuition i had about warping it back into shape seems to have worked, because it's as good as new now.

i really missed having a playable acoustic. things are all slowly coming into place...

another weird thing: i cut the strings off with a pair of electrical pliers that are probably older than i am and, for all i know, may have even belonged to my grandfather. what's weird about it is that it's the same set of pliers i used to use to cut the strings on the first acoustics i played with when i was roughly ten years old.

uploading proverbs demos to soundcloud

this is a very early (july 31, 2005), no effects demo of the second & third movements (reversed). there are a few flourishes, both gained & lost.

https://soundcloud.com/deathtokoalas/proverbs-symphony-movements-3-2-summer-2005 

i think we've all heard rumours of just how widespread the "buy fans" industry is on social media, but on soundcloud they've taken it to a different level. i'm actually getting spammed to buy likes, and i can't believe that's possible without some help from soundcloud.

well, the business models on these sites are notoriously bad. could they make money by selling likes? it might be the only way they're making money.

as mentioned, i've really tried to avoid soundcloud. i'm using it to hold lo-fi demos. i'd never upload anything finished there...

this is what i got spammed with:

https://soundcloud.com/jake_pk

open spamming suggests to me that the industry is working in plain view.

i mean, i'd never buy likes. it's pathetic. a non-starter. but it's actually not something that would help me either, as i'm more interesting when i'm obscure. if we want to talk venn diagrams, my intersection with popular culture is pretty much zero. it doesn't really matter how much i spend on buying likes or other kind of bullshit promo because what i'm creating is inherently revolting to anybody with a follower mindset. to me, buying likes is like trying to market tampons to teenage boys......it's floating a product that is entirely useless to that market.

i'd go so far as to argue that the type of person that is going to listen to my art is almost certainly going to use ad blocking software.

second section of guitar overdubs is done. after all the fucking around, i stuck with less is more, but i'm going to convert one of the counter-melodies into a vocal part, instead.

vocals? yeah. i think i'm going to get back to them, but generally release the material in instrumental form, as well. i know what it's like to enjoy a piece of music and despise the singer, so i'll provide that option.

i do consider myself handy enough with words, but i'm not a poet and have never aspired to be one. for all my rambling about the sanctity of art for art's sake, i'm pretty harsh on poetry as being pretty much useless. see, it strikes me either as a pretty base and unimaginative form of expression or as the height of pretension, with almost no middle ground. i'm more interested in observational writing.

but, maybe observational writing is sort of like poetry and i'm just being semantic. maybe it's actually the middle ground i seek. this could go around in circles for a while, so i'll be clear on the line i'm drawing; you can attach that line to different concepts as you see fit. the difference is in getting an idea across vs mentally masturbating around the language of a turn of phrase. the more obfuscated and layered your statement is, the less valuable the statement becomes. development is key in getting a point across, but the point is getting across the point, and i like to be as clear and straight to it as i can be. if you need a book to explain your poem, you've failed at communicating a message and might as well be just jerking off in the corner by yourself.

to me, this whole dialogue is a big part of what punk rock is really about.

it's not really a break. i've always used vocals, i've just jumped from using them liberally to using them sporadically, and it was mostly because i just didn't have anything i wanted to get across in the medium. if i had something to say, i would - and did. i actually think i can trace this decision back to about '06 or so, meaning it was only really in the early mid 00s that i mostly shunned vocals (although, again, it was never total). it's just that i have very little completed work to show for myself since '05.

anyways.

systems collapse is being stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides. so, let the factories turn to rust and let the buildings fall apart. if you need me, i'll be rocking out with the horn section...